The Civil War and Reconstruction

Abstract

Civil War and Reconstruction Ray B. Browne and Lawrence A. Kreiser, Jr. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2003. Subscribers to H-PCAACA, the listserv of the Popular Culture Association and the Culture Association, will remember that one of the founders of the organizations, Ray B. Browne, posted a call for book proposals concerning American Popular Culture Through History sometime in 2000. overall plan was to publish through the Greenwood Press a series of books covering the vital relationship between popular culture and the experience. Evidently, Dr. Browne received a number of proposals, because the Greenwood Press Web site lists a number of current books from the series on New Nation (Anita Vickers); Westward Expansion (Sara E. Quay); 190Os (Bob Batchlor); 1910s (David Blank); 1930s (William H. Young); and 1960s (Edward J. Reilly). Future volumes include 1940s (Robert Sickels) and 1990s (Marc Oxoby). Each volume concludes with Suggested Readings. When completed, this series of books will make an excellent survey for any public or research library, emphasizing the everyday life and culture of Americans from colonial times to the present. Civil War and Reconstruction is a representative work that follows a template of topics explored in all of the volumes. opening section contains a Timeline of Popular Culture Events in which such phenomena as tent shows and petroleum production take their place along with speeches by Abraham Lincoln and such developments as exercise theories and the abolition of slavery. This approach yields fascinating counterpoints and gives a special spin to the familiar history of a painful era in history. simultaneity of political, social, and technical developments can reveal unexpected insights; when I produced my Will Rogers: A Biobibliography, I constructed such lists and learned quite a bit in the process. body of the volume is divided into general categories that I assume are explored by all books in the series; advertising, architecture, clothing and fashion, food, leisure activities, literature, music, the performing arts, travel, and the visual arts all receive a chapter. This division should prove useful for researchers with a narrow interst, an interest that could be pursued through the volumes. There is an index for more detailed searches. organization of the book reads like a poster for the national meeting of the PCA/ACA, with each chapter representing a major area of research appropriate to the period between 1852 and 1877. Anyone who has been to a national meeting of the these professional groups will know the eclectic flavor of such an intellectual menu. And anyone familiar with Russel Nye's Unembarrassed Muse will understand the difficulties of such a survey; there is tension throughout the book between the depth of the topics and the need to cover much territory. strengths of the book are obvious. Most students of culture have familiarity with the canonic narratives of the experience, and many know something about the popular culture highlights. Because of our training in graduate programs of a traditional bent-and this is not a criticism, just an observation-the interrelationships among elements of high and low culture are either unstudied or not perceived. virtue of this book, and I assume of the series as a whole, is that it ties many obscure elements of popular culture to each other in a synergy that will inspire a better understanding of ordinary people and their lives. There is a whole territory of life in America that eludes the grasp of many scholars. What kind of technology was coming to market, and how was it advertised? What did the advertising say about audience expectations and the level of ethics in the marketplace during what Mark Twain called The Gilded Age? Domestic architecture and public buildings were being constructed in new styles; how did the innovations reflect the contemporary sensibility? …